


clairvoyant

by ictus



Category: Batman (Comics), DCU (Comics)
Genre: Gen, Pre-Flashpoint (DCU)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-17
Updated: 2018-02-17
Packaged: 2019-03-20 06:14:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13711596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ictus/pseuds/ictus
Summary: Jason’s knuckles are bruised and split, and his smile has lost none of its edge.





	clairvoyant

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by Gotham Knights #43-#45, [these pages](https://imgur.com/a/7HnkU) in particular. Takes place immediately following Under the Hood.

Barbara wakes to the sound of harsh, ragged breathing.

There’s someone else here. She knows it before she even opens her eyes, has to bite back a scream when her brain finally processes what she’s seeing.

There’s a man sitting at the foot of her bed. He’s in profile, facing the window, and in the dim light she can only just make out his silhouette. The metallic tang of blood fills the air—Barbara can taste it on her tongue—and the knowledge that her intruder is significantly wounded is a small comfort.

He’s not yet noticed she’s awake. Choking down her terror, she discreetly inches her hand towards the edge of the mattress and feels for the panic button on the underside of her bedframe.

Her blood runs cold when she touches exposed wires. The circuitry has been destroyed.

“Heya, Red.” Barbara jerks her hand away as if she’d been shocked. The man’s voice is soft and familiar, even though she’s certain she’s never heard it before. He had turned towards her for a moment, but the shifting shadows render his face unrecognisable, the darkness obscuring his face better than any domino.

She takes a deep breath. Remembers her training. The man’s turned to face the window once again, gazing out at the Gotham skyline, and she takes advantage of his inattention by frantically scanning the room for anything she could use as a weapon. She keeps her eskrima bastons holstered on her chair, if she can just reach them—

“Y’know, I never really got the appeal of these things,” he says conversationally. Barbara’s eyes snap back to him and her stomach lurches. He’s lazily tossing one of her bastons so it spins in the air like a juggler’s baton. The other, she realises helplessly, is clutched in his bloodied fist. “I mean, sometimes life calls for a bit of blunt force trauma, don’t get me wrong,” he shoots her a vicious smile out of the corner of his mouth. “But me? Well, I try to work with a little more finesse.”

He tosses both the bastons over his shoulder where they roll under her dresser, causing Barbara to make an anguished sound that quickly dies in her throat. He slowly reaches into his jacket and pulls out a flame dagger that looks like it could be an ancient relic. Barbara’s heart jumps in her throat, anticipating his attack, but he simply turns the dagger in his hands and begins idly picking the blood out from underneath his fingernails with the tip of the blade, seemingly disinterested in her.

Barbara tries to pull herself up into a seated position but finds it impossible. It takes her several seconds to realise the man is actually sitting on her legs, pinning her down. Suddenly her fear gives way to anger, furious that her would-be assailant isn’t even allowing her the dignity of sitting up and looking him in the eye.

It’s fury, finally, that helps her find her voice. “Who are you?”

The man’s laughter is a mirthless, broken thing. “Do you really want me to give the game away so soon? Come on now, consider the evidence.” Barbara’s bed is high off the ground—it makes transitioning between the chair and the bed that much easier—and the man’s feet dangle off the edge by about an inch. He’s kicking his legs restlessly in a way that speaks of pent-up energy that could be dangerous; yet the action is strangely child-like and unnervingly familiar.

He leans forward for a moment, catching the streetlight streaming in from the open window. His throat is stained with blood, dark and thick. Barbara can almost make out the shape of a wound, a jagged cut so deep that, had it hit the artery, would have surely killed him in seconds.

A long moment passes. Barbara takes another deep breath, considers changing her tactics. “I can get you something for that, if you’d like.”

He starts, seeming to have forgotten she was even there. With the amount of blood he’s lost, it’s not surprising.

“What, for this?” He runs a distracted hand over his neck. “Nah, I’ll live. And if I don’t? Well… maybe this time it’ll take.” He shoots her another side-long grin, and Barbara’s starting to get a read on him now, sees how he’s using his bravado to hide his pain.

“Come on detective,” he says mockingly, “don’t you want to cross-examine me?”

Barbara props herself up on her elbows as best as she can from this position. She reaches on the nightstand for her glasses and is gratified when her hands are only slightly trembling. “Why are you here?”

“I came to see you,” he says plainly.

“Do we know each other?”

“We did. In another life.” The part of his face that’s not shrouded in shadow is smirking again. Barbara’s hyper-aware of the blade in his hands, of the way he’s constantly shifting it from one hand to the other.

“Were we friends?”

“We were… allies. Soldiers in arms.” Something about the word _soldier_ nags at the back of Barbara’s mind. Her first thought had been that maybe he was an ex-con that her dad had put away—or a dirty cop that he’d had kicked off the force—coming for revenge on their family. It wouldn’t be the first time someone hurt her to get at someone close to her. But there’s something undeniably familiar about him, something that she can’t quite place.

“You don’t mind if I—?” He’s produced a carton of cigarettes from inside his jacket, maintaining his grip on the dagger’s hilt all the while, and it’s all the warning she gets before he lights up and inhales. In the brief flicker of the lighter’s flame, Barbara gets a good look at his face and is surprised by how young he looks, more like a teenager than an adult.

The smell of cigarettes fills the room, but Barbara notices an undercurrent of something sharper, cooler. Like mint.

Menthols.

“There’s no such thing as coincidence,” he says as if reading her thoughts, echoing a mantra she’s heard a hundred times.

A mantra that they both have.

_Robin._

“Jason.”

He reclines back onto his elbows and blows a plume of smoke into the air. “A plus, Barb. You always were the sharpest out of any of us. Sharper than him, even.”

Barbara’s head is spinning. “It’s not possible,” she says. Then to herself, “I’m dreaming.”

That gets another laugh out of him. “Barb, are your dreams usually this kind to you?”

He’s not wrong. Barbara thinks of the maniacal laughter that usually haunts her dreams, purple suits and a chilling smile, and thinks for the first time that Jason’s dreams mustn’t be so different.

But this man is not Jason.

Jason is dead. Barbara buried him, mourned him. They all did.

“You’re lying. This is a ploy.” She means for it to be an accusation but her voice cracks, betraying her desperation to believe there’s a chance any of it might be true. “Tell me something only he would know.”

He sits up again and takes a final drag of his cigarette before stubbing it out on the sole of his boot and flicking it out he window. He’s motionless, staring out at the lightening sky for so long that Barbara wonders if the blood loss has become so much that he’s lost the thread of the conversation.

“Remember that time we tracked those smugglers out to a fishing boat on Gotham harbour?” Barbara has an eidetic memory, remembers every detail of that day. It was one of the last times she ever saw Jason. “And this big beefy guy was coming at you, and I shot him right through his hand with a… with a—”

His voice trails off. Barbara can see he’s fading fast, already so much less lucid than he was when she woke. “With a spear gun?”

He huffs out a laugh, sounding deflated. “Yeah, that’s right. And I remember, you asked me why I did it? And I said something like, ‘anyone who cuts one of us gets cut in return’, do you remember?”

She does. Jason had been barely fifteen and was bursting with misdirected rage. Bruce had thought that giving Jason Robin meant giving him an outlet through which to channel his anger, but it only fuelled it, made it burn brighter. Bruce had willingly turned a blind eye, had refused to intervene and help Jason find healthier ways of working through his anger.

But then again, that would have forced Bruce to examine his own issues.

“Looks like I was the only one who felt that way,” he mumbles more to himself than to Barbara. When he continues, his voice is stronger. “Anyway, then you told me off for smoking, said it would cut my life expectancy in half. Guess you were right about the outcome but missed the mark on the cause, huh?”

Barbara’s speechless. She never told anyone that Jason shot that perp, and she certainly didn’t tell anyone about the cigarettes—although she doesn’t doubt that Bruce knew all along.

“Jason,” she says, finally believing it. She wants to reach for him, to comfort him. But she’s forced to remind herself that this man is an unknown variable, dangerous and unpredictable. “Jason, what happened to you?”

He’s silent for a long moment before replying, “you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Please, Jason, just talk to me, how did—”

“Did he ever tell you about Garzonas?” Barbara falters, thrown by the non-sequitur. She hasn’t heard that name in years but her memory, as reliable as ever, recalls the facts as clearly as if the case file were sitting in front of her. Felipe Garzonas. Son of a diplomat. Arrested on rape charges but released due to diplomatic immunity. Fell 22 storeys to his death following an altercation with Robin. His death was ruled an accident, but Barbara—

“Did he?” he asks again, suddenly impatient.

“Yes,” she replies finally.

“What did he say?”

“He said… he wanted to believe you when you said he slipped.”

“But…?” Jason prompts, still not looking at her.

Barbara swallows. “But he couldn’t.”

“Huh,” Jason says, ducking his head. His posture seems to crumble a little, caving in on himself. “And what do you think,” he asks, staring at his knees.

Barbara hesitates. The dagger is an unspoken threat in his hands. “I think… I think you were a good kid who had been through a lot, and got caught up with—”

He cuts her off with a burst of laughter that’s so dissimilar from how it was when he was a boy, the underlying bitterness sparking a pain deep in Barbara’s chest. “Don’t fucking patronise me, Barbara. Do you think I did it or not?”

Barbara thinks of a young boy with a vicious smile who had more anger than he knew what to do with. Thinks of how Jason attacked criminals with such brutality that he always came away from fights with bruised knuckles, even through the gauntlets, even though he taped them. Thinks of how ruthlessly he avenged her that day on the fishing boat.

“Yes.”

He nods minutely, eyes never leaving the skyline. When he finally speaks again, it sounds hollow and distant. “Do you think I could ever be capable of doing something like that again?”

Barbara swallows hard. Jason’s knuckles are bruised and split, and his smile has lost none of its edge.

“Yes.”

Jason nods again, but doesn’t speak. In the dawn light Barbara can see that his eyes are hooded and unfocused, and he’s begun to sway slightly on the bed, dizziness making it difficult for him to remain upright. Barbara’s noticed his grip on the dagger has slackened, but she doesn’t dare move. Not yet.

For a long time, the only sounds in the room are Jason’s laboured breathing. It’s Barbara who finally breaks the silence.

“I warned him, you know.” Jason’s eyes are closed now, his face gone slack, and he makes no indication that he’s even heard her. But Barbara’s held onto this for years, can’t stop now that she’s started. “When he told me he didn’t catch the Joker, he said that the Joker would keep, that the Joker would wait until he had a clear shot before attacking.” Barbara never once imagined that of these two men, it’s Bruce’s name that she cannot bring herself to say aloud. “I warned him that the Joker didn’t have to directly attack him in order to hurt him. But he didn’t listen. And then…”

Barbara trails off. She thinks of herself; the cool metal of the gun biting into her stomach, an excruciating pain for which she has no words, the insurmountable panic when she tried to move her legs and found she couldn’t. She thinks of Jason; body so far gone they’d barely had anything to bury, the dates on his headstone telling the story of a life cut far too short. Thinks of what she’d said to Bruce at his funeral, her voice barely a whisper carried on the wind.

_I told you._

“Jason, I’m so sorry.”

Jason is impassive, his breathing now deep and even. With his eyes closed and his expression blank, Barbara could almost believe he were sleeping. He’s almost completely relinquished his grip on the dagger which seems to be seconds away from tumbling out of his hands.

It’s now or never.

Barbara extends a steady hand, keeping her eyes trained on his face the entire time. She’s inches away, all she needs to do is grasp the hilt—

“I’m gonna to do it,” Jason says suddenly, his voice thick. Barbara flinches, retracting her hand. “’M gonna do it,” he repeats to himself, still not opening his eyes. “I gave him a chance, a chance to set things right. But he didn’t… knew he wouldn’t.” Jason’s words are slurred, his speech nonsensical.

“You gave who a chance, Jason?”

“Bruce.” His voice breaks on the single syllable, as if the pain of saying the name aloud is causing more anguish than any of his wounds. Jason’s eyelids are fluttering rapidly and he has to grip the edge of the mattress to stay upright. “But don’t you worry, Barb. ‘M gonna finish it. ‘M gonna put him down.”

“You’re going to put who down, Jason?”

“Joker.”

Barbara’s throat constricts. “Jason, you can’t. That’s not how we do things. I know you may think he deserves it but he—”

But what? How can she look Jason in the eye and tell him that this man, this _monster_ —who put her in a chair, who ended Jason’s life and so many others’—doesn’t deserve to die? She’s lived her life by her father’s code, by Bruce’s. But at what point is the cost of the life you take outweighed by the cost of the lives that are taken because of your inaction?

Jason’s eyes flutter open and he turns towards her squarely, finally facing her for the first time. He holds her gaze for a long moment, something unspoken passing between them. The sun’s first rays are illuminating his face, and for a moment Barbara sees not a man, but the boy she once knew.

When he speaks his voice is soft and fond, and his smile is crooked—just as she remembers.

“’S good to see you, Barb.” 

He rises wordlessly and is out of her reach within seconds. Barbara’s stranded in her bed, the distance between them insurmountable. He’s unsteady on his feet, but he manages to swing both legs over the windowsill, landing heavily onto the fire escape outside. She tries desperately to form the words that will make him stay, but finds that she can’t—wonders if she’s even entitled to that.

He fires his grapple and disappears into the dawn. The bloody smear on her windowsill is the only evidence he leaves behind.


End file.
